Effects of Marital Conflict Management Skills on Marital Stability among Literate Couples in Northern Cross River State

ABSTRACT

This study was undertaken to find out the acquisition of management skills and how this stabilizes a marriage relationship in term of conflict in the home. The study was also aimed at discovering the effect of treatment on couples who attended a management skill programme and those who do not. A total of two thousand couples were selected by purposive sampling technique from ten churches in the Northern Cross River State. These couples were found to have some deficiency in management skill and so conflict were often times mismanaged. The couples for experimental study were put into two groups. The experimental and control. The experimental received treatment while the control did not. 

The experimental group programme was packaged into four weeks interaction sessions, each lasting for one hour.  Pre-test post-test using couples checklist were collected from the two groups.  

The two research designs of the study included the survey and quasi experimental pre-test post-test. The principles of using two designs were employed to adequately maximize the collection of data.  Analysis of the research questions was done using statistical package for social science (SPSS), means and standard deviations while the hypotheses were tested using both t-test for independent samples and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).  The discrimination in the use of these statistical tools was informed by the need to achieve enough sensitivities in these tests.

Specific findings of the study showed that couples required management skills to achieve cordiality in a marriage relationship.  The favourable and unfavourable nature of conflict in marriage by gender, family size, family location, family structure and educational status had some determined influence on the direction of marital success of literate couples in Northern Cross River State. The findings of the study also showed that there were no significant differences in the expectations about marriage by male and female couples.

The implication of the findings is that couples’ level of education in a way assists in effective handling of marital conflict.

In line with contending, pre-marital counselling was perceived in the study to be the most important predictor for assisting couples in handling marital conflicts.  The study recommends the need for family life education as a general course of study that would improve on successful marriage.